1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to spoken dialog systems and more specifically to a system and method of active learning to bootstrap a spoken language understanding module.
2. Introduction
Spoken dialog systems enable customers to express what they want in spoken natural language. To carry on such a natural language dialog, the spoken dialog system generally consists of various modules to process the received speech sounds from the customer and generate a synthetic speech response. These modules comprise an automatic speech recognition module, a spoken language understanding module, a dialog management module, and a text-to-speech module.
The process of building a spoken dialog system is traditionally a very time-consuming and labor-intensive activity for training and generating each of these modules. The present invention relates to an improvement in the method of training the spoken language understanding module. A spoken language understanding module generated according to the method disclosed herein may or may not be used with a spoken dialog system containing all the other modules but may have other applications as well.